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Two weeks ago, I sustained two back-to-back concussions to the frontal lobe of my brain. I took off from work to convalesce, but I don’t have much to say about that. This is is because I was unconscious nearly the entire time. Sleep, I was told by the doctors, was the most surefire way to ensure a speedy and permanent recovery. So I slept. I took melatonin gummies and fish oil capsules and slept, and then woke up and did it all again. Occasionally I’d eat. Once or twice I went on a walk. But sleep was preferable… and not only because it was the thing guaranteed to return my brain to normal as quickly as possible. But also because I was extremely bored. The thing about a concussion is that you can’t tax your brain in any way, while it’s healing. A concussion is a bruise, essentially, the result of your brain smashing into your own skull during moments of extreme impact or preposterous jostling. You can’t strain your vision, lest it slow recovery. Bright lights and focused watching will only make things work. So, no screen time, no reading, no writing… not even, the doctor told me, thinking too much. This was shocking. Never before had a doctor advocated for “not thinking.” Never before had anyone. I don’t spend my time fraternizing with chauvinistic villains from Disney movie. What would I be like without being able to think? I tried to heed these warnings as best I could, but some of them, like this last one, led to more questions. Occasionally, I’d sneak in a few glances at my computer. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I had to. And when I flipped open my laptop, the thing I wanted to do was learn about concussions. I learned from the Oxford English Dictionary Online that the word “concussion” in its meaning of “the shock of impact,” goes back at least to 1490, and the word in its meaning of “a brain injury caused by a sudden blow” goes back at least to 1541. I learned from the writer Roger von Oech, the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, that there are two kinds of thinking: soft and hard. Soft thinking is light, observational, dreamy. Hard thinking is problem-solving. If I got a lot of sleep during the first few days of my concussion, my doctor told me, I’d be able to go back to soft thinking soon enough. This was appalling. “But,” I attempted to reason with my physician. “I’m a writer.” He looked at me. “Not right now, you aren’t.” So, sleep became more enjoyable than lying awake, aware of what I was missing and yet bound from thinking about it. Duly, I slept. And now I’m back. Mostly. I still need to rest a lot. But I’ve blown through soft thinking back to hard. And the first thing I did was use my mostly-rehabilitated faculties to put together a listicle about the only topic on my mind since I walked into that scaffolding pole: head injuries. Yes, this is a list about the most intense head injuries in (crime) film. Now, I should clarify… I’m not talking about cases and after-effects of grievous head trauma like in Memento or The Bourne Identity or Regarding Henry or even The Wizard of Oz. This isn’t a list about hallucinations, amnesiac episodes, or other brain conditions brought on by hits to the head. I’m simply talking about blows or knocks to the head: on-camera instances of “getting hit in the head” that are so painful-seeming, you can’t help but wince when you watch them. Like this list, but not specifically about noses. About the whole head. I also don’t mean, like, savage beheadings or explosions. This isn’t a list where you’ll find the pane of glass thing from The Omen or ANY sequence from ANY Matthew Vaughn movie. I’m also not including moments where someone smashes their own head onto a table. No Talk to Me, no Longlegs, not *that* scene from Fight Club, no Hereditary, no The Lobster. I mean, this also clarifies what we’re doing about genre: this isn’t a list of horror movies; it’s a list of crime (or crime-adjacent) movies. I would love to include the scene from Chocolat where Lena Olin smashes Peter Stormare’s head with a frying pan when he attacks her and Juliet Binoche in a violent, alcoholic rage (“who says I can’t use a skillet?”), but it’s not a crime movie. I am permitting action-adventure movies and sci-fi adventure movies on this list, however. No boxing movies, though, unless they are very much about crime. Now… are we including head injuries that kill? If it were a crime movie, would we include Dolph Lungren’s left hook that kills Apollo Creed in Rocky IV? I don’t think so. I think people need to be able to eventually wake up and walk/limp away? This list is just moments of blunt force trauma to the skull! That’s all it is! This list is not ranked. It is not comprehensive. And if there are any gaping holes in this list… don’t get mad at me… I have a concussion. OK, here we go: Henry Cavill Smashing Liang Yang’s Face with a Laptop in Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018) He breaks the computer… but he knocks the guy out. Turns out, they needed that computer to make a MASK of the guy’s face… so Tom Cruise is pretty annoyed. John Wayne’s “What time is it?” door-breaking punch in The Quiet Man (1952) Is The Quiet Man a crime movie? No. Is it about manslaughter? Yes! So it gets a pass. Welcome to the ring, TQM. The Quiet Man is about a boxer who kills a guy in the ring, and then goes to his homeland in Ireland to buy back his family’s property and live there in peace. But things go haywire when it turns out another man has designs on the land… and John Wayne begins a romance with that guy’s sister. Anyway, there’s a scene where John Wayne clocks a guy in the jaw so hard that he goes flying through a closed wooden door, Looney-Tunes style. Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci Get Walloped By Swinging Paint Cans in Home Alone (1990) I cannot imagine the pain experienced by Harry and Marv during the whole booby trap break-in sequence, but I really, really don’t envy their getting clocked in the head by the swinging paint cans. Indiana Jones Punching the Nazi Out of the Blimp in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) You know the scene I mean: “No ticket!” A Punch Makes Michael Biehn Go Flying in The Abyss (1989) God I love The Abyss. I don’t want to spoil anything about it, so I’ll just say that there’s a part where Michael Biehn’s villain, Lt. Coffey (who is going crazy due to high-pressure nervous syndrome from being at such a lot altitude), tries to kill our hero Ed Harris, but he’s stopped by Leo Burmeister’s Catfish De Vries. And Catfish decks him in the face so hard that he goes flying through the air and lands in a puddle, his body making an enormous splash. That’s gotta hurt. Rip Torn Hits Norman Mailer on the Head with a Hammer in Maidstone (1970) Norman Mailer’s underground film Maidstone was a subversive, non-scripted fiction narrative film, captured documentary-style, about a chauvinist filmmaker named Norman T. Kingsley, who an exploitation film about a brothel, who simultaneously embarks on a presidential run and survives an assassination attempt, all on his rural New York compound. Rip Torn, who plays Kingsley’s brother, tries to kill him at the end by beating him over the head with a hammer. This was the least scripted part of an already non-scripted movie; Torn thought that Maidstone didn’t have a clear ending planned, so he thought he’d make one. He did this by literally hitting Mailer over the head with a hammer. Some sources online say it was a toy hammer, but I’ve spoken with people there, and nope… it was real, making this the only movie on the list where the head trauma sustained in a narrative is equal to that sustained by the performers. Speaking of hammers, there is an amazing corridor fight sequence in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), but there isn’t one particular clock in the head that is so bad it should go on this list. Ed Norton Ruins Jared Leto’s Face in Fight Club (2000) I certainly think that the “destroying something beautiful” scene from Fight Club counts for this list. Also most of Fight Club counts for this list. But the Leto-face-mutilation scene is definitely the worst head trauma we witness. Joe Pantoliano’s Steel Beam to the Head in The Fugitive (1993) The Fugitive normally tops all my lists, and this is no exception. There is one agonizingly painful-seeming head injury here, towards the end of the film, when good-guy U.S. Marshall Cosmo Renfro (Joe Pantoliano) is looking for a killer in a dark industrial floor of a hotel, the laundry room. The killer creeps up behind him and swings a suspended metal girder into his face, bringing him down instantly. His final words in the film speak volumes about his pain and exhaustion: “Tell Samuel Gerard I’m going home now. I’m taking my vacation.” View the full article

“Crack killed everything.” –Nas, 2012 It was a chilly spring night in 1984 and I was returning uptown from my cashier job at Miss Brooks, a fast food coffee shop located near 56th Street and 6th Avenue. Working from 3 PM to 11 PM, after closing time a few of the staff usually went out for drinks. By 2 AM, I would down one more pint of brew before walking over to 57th Street with the short order cook Xavier. We both lived on 151st Street off Broadway. Xavier was a recent transplant from the Bronx. I had dwelled in that neighborhood since boyhood. While that nether world between Harlem and Washington Heights is now named Hamilton Heights, in those days we didn’t really call it anything but home. When I moved there in 1967 (when I was 4) with mom, grandma and baby brother, the working class community was a melting pot of races, religions and cultures that included down south Blacks, like my grandmother, holdover Jewish families who hadn’t migrated to Long Island, Puerto Ricans and a few Asian families. Like an urban coming-of-age novel by Walter Dean Myers, I have fond childhood memories of the area, where I could see the Hudson River from the stoop. There are many remembrances that include the array of friends (and their parents) that lived in our building. Boys and girls together, we played stickball in the street, had Saturday afternoon trips to the Tapia movie theater where we watched Blaxploitation and kung-fu flicks, and afterwards crowded into each other’s apartments where we spun the latest soul/funk records, watched cartoons and sometimes had sleepovers. On the second floor, my friend Stanley, was into comic books and could draw Marvel characters that looked exactly like the panels of our penciling hero Jack Kirby. His younger brother Beedee, who could do Warner Brothers cartoon voices as well as Mel Blanc, was another bestie. Across the hall from my first floor apartment, Jackie shared my passion for novels and music while Darryl’s dad, who was also Jackie’s dad, once treated us to a Betty Boop film festival that changed my cartoon loving life. However, in the latter part, of the decade, our small world began to shatter when our buddy Marvin from the fourth-floor, the same dude who gave me my first sex-ed lesson when we found a stack of porn magazines in the trash, moved away. Later, Darryl and Jackie’s parents decided to relocate as well. Raised by both my mother and grandmother, in 1978 mom one day surprised us when she announced that me, her and baby brother Carlos were moving to Baltimore while grandma would be staying in New York. Homesick from the moment I got off the Amtrak in the city of spicy crabs and the ghost of Poe, for the next three years I attended Northwestern High School while plotting my inevitable return to New York City. Moving back to Manhattan in 1981, I stayed with my grandmother, between college and various girlfriends, for the next ten years, and witnessed first-hand the transformation of our community. In the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, the latest immigrants, the Dominicans, began moving uptown in search of their piece of the American Dream. With the demographic shift, there were now different stores and restaurants lining the blocks, different music blaring from parked cars and apartment windows. By 1984 the once small minority from “D.R.” had become the majority and, when the then-latest drug “crack” hit the streets that year, the uptown Dominicans found an illegal business that would make them rich, just as bootleg liquor had made Joseph Kennedy. Stepping off the subway one night with Xavier, we exited the 147th train station around 2:30 am. Standing on the corner, a young Black man eyeballed us from a few feet away and began muttering, “Yo, crack man, I got that crack.” We just shook our heads and kept on stepping. Having never heard of “crack,” I assumed it was the slang for the latest marijuana on the market, like Acapulco gold, Buddha or Sess. “I think I want to try some of that crack,” I said later, gulping from a forty-ounce in Xavier’s small bedroom. He looked at me as though I was crazy. “You don’t want to mess with that stuff,” he warned, sagely. “What are you talking about? Isn’t it just another kind of weed?” “It’s not weed. It’s some stuff they mix with cocaine, like freebase for poor folks.” The only thing I knew about “freebasing” was that comic Richard Pryor damn near burned himself to death using it. Growing-up, I had read about coke, but as far as I knew the expensive white powder was something that celebrities and other ritzy folks did in recording studios, on movie sets and in the back rooms of Studio 54 or Xenon; indeed, I believed, it had nothing to do with the people in my community. *** It can be scary when your world begins to change, but that is exactly what happened when crack usage began spreading through our community. It was as though someone dropped a lit match on a pile of old newspapers. The hellish inferno quickly spread and burned steadily for more than a decade. Never before had cocaine (and guns) been so cheap and plentiful. Of course, I knew people who smoked weed or angel dust, and had seen a few heroin nodders leaning on Amsterdam Avenue, but crack was a another story, a sadder story, a wilder story as brazen dealers stood on building stoops pretending to be Scarface while selling their product openly, as though the stuff was legal. Packaged in plastic vials with prices that ranged from five to fifty dollars, one puff, so they said, was enough to make you a junkie for life, a fiend forever trying to capture the euphoria of that first hit. The drug was smoked in a various ways with the most popular being circular glass “crack pipes.” As a former English major who read George Orwell, the year 1984 had always had cultural significance, but no one could’ve have predicted the wrath of that crack would have on NYC a mere twelve months after being introduced. A year after seeing that first coke dealing corner boy, many close friends became addicted to the “rock.” I saw my homegirl Paula from the fourth floor, a smart Black girl who had gone to Catholic school and City College, begin to lose weight rapidly and looking extremely wild; while, two stories down, Stanley no longer drew comic book characters, but was often seen zooted. However, while the stereotype of crack junkies were Black people, white kids from Jersey were coming over the George Washington Bridge nightly. In addition to the drugs, a glut of high-powered automatic weapons (nine-millimeters, Uzis) hit the streets and shoot-outs between dealers became the new symphony of the night. In many cases, those dudes didn’t know jack about aiming or control, so countless innocent bystanders were blasted by stray bullets. Through it all, the cops virtually disappeared from the scene. Although the 30th precinct, located on 151st between Amsterdam and Convent Avenues (around the corner was the Battlegrounds basketball court) was only two blocks away, the cops were usually seen in clusters after something bad already happened. Still carrying six-shooters, many of them were scared while others were being “paid in full,” taking money or drugs from dealers, and then selling their own stashes as though Serpico never existed. It took years before the “Dirty 30” was put in check. Ed Bradley did a great segment of 60 Minutes (“NYPD: The Blue Wall Of Silence”) in 1995 that told the complete story. As the lawlessness became a regular part of the landscape, loco drug dealers began shooting out the streetlights, making it easier for them to operate undetected in the darkness. Once upon a time fine girls, like my pretty friend Barbara from across the street, were sauntering down the block offering “blow jobs for five dollars.” Snarling pit bulls became the pet du jour and sometimes, for no reason, either the junkies or dealers set the corner trash bins on fire simply to watch the blaze. By the time the pop group Culture Club sang “Karma Chameleon” on Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve, ringing in 1985, the communities of Harlem, Hamilton Heights and Washington Heights had darkened as though a massive black cloud hovered over us. *** In the winter of 1985, as the neighborhood became grittier than a Rza beat, I had the first of what would become a recurring nightmare. In that dreadful dream, the apartment building where I’d been raised was on fire with the hallway engulfed in smoke and flames. Friends and strangers ran across the dirty marble floors screaming, but incapable of escaping. A few months after that first dream, my friend Barbara became the first crack causality that I knew personally. A tall, dark-skinned girl who could’ve been a model when she was a teenager, Barbara graduated from George Washington High School a few years before. When exactly she started “beamin’ up,” I had no idea, but witnessing her fall into the crack abyss made me angry. Sometimes I saw her outside, walking-up the hill to meet the man once again, and we spoke to one another. Sometimes there was a glimmer of shame in her brown eyes, but most of the time she just kept on moving. It wasn’t until one day I noticed that she was pregnant that I even bought up her problem. “I hope you not smoking that stuff while you’re pregnant,” I said, hoping to sound more like a big brother than a judgmental square. “That stuff can hurt your baby.” She smiled. “I’m not, Michael. Don’t worry, I’m not. I’m not that bad.” Whether she was smoking during those nine months, I don’t know, but a few weeks after giving birth, Barbara went on a binge and died inside a nearby crack house. Word on the street was that her lungs collapsed. Not everybody I knew from the old block became crack heads, a few became dealers instead. James Hooks (name changed), who lived on the first floor of dead Barbara’s building, was just one of them. A few years younger, we didn’t really start hanging-out until we were both in our twenties. A Pisces born elder son, James lived with his big family that included grandparents, two sisters, one brother and an under-the-influence mother. Sitting on the stoop one evening sharing a forty-ounce of malt liquor, which the billboard advertisements with Billy Dee Williams throughout the community assured us “worked every time,” and would lead to riches and beautiful women, I asked James, “How do you do it, man?” “Do what?” “You know, some of these crack fiends look so pathetic and beat down, how do you keep selling that stuff to them?” “You bugging? I don’t care nothing about them. If they want it, I’m going to sell it to them. Somebody gonna sell it to them, why let the other man get them dollars. I don’t care who I sell it to or what they look like. If you became a crack head tomorrow, I’d sell it to you. If my own mother wanted some rock, I’d sell it to her too.” Thinking to myself, that’s the coldest thing I’d ever heard, I took another swig of lukewarm beer and remained silent. *** Months later, having fallen in love with a young downtown actress who lived on 24th Street and 2nd Avenue, I began spending more time away from the hood and more hours seeing art films, dancing at trendy clubs, sipping martinis and trying to digest the unreadable Naked Lunch. Still, every few days I rode uptown to visit my grandmother, and when I did, I always made time for James. Unlike the crazed dealers depicted in urban gangster films, James wasn’t on some hyper ultra-violent power trip. I don’t even think he carried a gun, but if he did, he wasn’t into waving it around or threatening people. Every now and then, I’d go with him to the drug spot on 146th Street, so he could “re-up.” The spot was a desolate apartment on the third floor of a tenement building. Walking up the stairs, I could hear the sounds of crying babies and loud televisions. Greeted at the door by a hulking jerri-curled dude carrying an Uzi, the transactions were done in the middle of what used to be the living room. There was a drug scale, an endless supply of cocaine and plastic bags. The coke was shoveled onto the scale using playing cards. Talking in fucked-up Spanish while “Tony Montana” spoke in broken English, James bought the blow (“fish scale, poppi”) and cooked the crack at another location. One summer Sunday afternoon, he and I were standing on Broadway with when a fight broke out between a two dealers. James knew enough of the language to know this wasn’t a good look. Grabbing me by the sleeve of my shirt, James screamed, “We gotta get out of here.” “Why?” “This ain’t time for questions,” he replied as we ambled down the blocked. Seconds later, shots were fired. Turning around, I witnessed one of the Dominican dealers shoot his friend six times. As the bullet-ridden victim fell, I vomited and teared up. James looked at me and laughed. “You’re not built for these streets,” he said and we walked on Riverside Drive headed back to our own block. Later, I witnessed more dudes getting shot and killed, but it wasn’t something I would ever get used to. Sometimes I believe that part of what got me into writing crime fiction was as a way of channeling some of the negativity I saw and absorbed during that period of my life. Though most of my stories take place in, as photographer Jamel Shabazz calls “a time before crack,” I am still weighted down by the heaviness of those days. In 1986 journalist Barry Michael Cooper wrote the first article about the drug for Spin magazine. Most of his story took place in my neighborhood from Broadway and 145th Street and got worse the further east you travelled. Down those mean streets the dealers were mostly young African-Americans who had little idea how much pain and damage they were inflicting on the community. “Crack is, for many, escape, booster, stabilizer, and status quo,” Cooper wrote. “Known on the street as “the white genie in the bottle” (it is sold in vials), a rub of the crack lantern grants the wish for temporary residence in the dreamstate of your own design.” A few years later Cooper used his research to write the screenplay for New Jack City (1991), a crack origin story and crime classic. “Harlem is split into two periods: BC and AC, Before Crack and After Crack,” Cooper told Stop Smiling in 2007. “There was a profound change when that drug hit Harlem. I think crack became so widespread because it didn’t involve needles. People are scared of needles. With crack, you smoked it, and it was an immediate high.” Certainly, no amount of First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” ads or Pee-Wee Herman anti-crack commercials was going to stop the epidemic. My grandmother, who had lived in Harlem since the 1950s, compared that era to “the wild wild west,” which was quite fitting. In 1987 Harlem hip-hop pioneers Kool Moe Dee and Teddy Riley made a record with that exact name. *** In 1991, I was living back uptown with my grandmother and working at a homeless shelter on the Lower East Side called Catherine Street. One day at lunchtime I ran into my old neighbor Paula. She had cleaned-up her crack head ways and was working as a drug counselor at a local hospital. “Well, they got the right one,” I joked. Returning home one afternoon, grandma was more nervous than usual. Sitting on the side of her bed listening to 1010-WINS and literally twiddling her thumbs, she said, “Go in the living room and look at the ceiling.” Walking into the room, I looked upwards and saw a massive bullet hole. Standing behind me, grandma said, “I was sitting in here watching The Price is Right, when something told me to go into the kitchen. When I did, I heard a loud noise and saw this.” Afterwards I went across the street to James’s crib, and he introduced me to the drug dealers who lived upstairs from my grandmother in apartment 2-E. Although I knew there were a few drug apartments in our building, I had never seen these guys. “Poppi, I’m so sorry, but some asshole was playing with the nine (millimeter) and it went off. Tomorrow, I’ll send somebody to fix the hole.” “Fix the hole?” I laughed. “Fix the hole? Man, you could’ve killed my grandmother.” “We sorry, poppi. Did your grandmother call the police? Did she tell them we were drug dealers?” Getting nervous, I answered, “I’m sure she didn’t tell them you were drug dealers, because she didn’t know you were drug dealers. Hell, I didn’t even know until just now.” “OK, poppi. We’ll fix the hole tomorrow.” Two months later, with the massive hole still in the ceiling, grandma packed-up twenty-four years worth of memories and moved to Baltimore with my mom. *** Still living in New York City, but dwelling in Chelsea in the 1990s and moving to Brooklyn in ’99. I always returned to 151st Street to refresh the memory machine for future fictions, including the 2024 crack era story “Oasis,” published in Rock and a Hard Place #12. Though that maddening time made me a bit crazy and a lot paranoid, I still dig crack era related pop culture including songs (Oran Juice Jones’ “Pipe Dreams,” The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments”), books (“Crackhouse” by Terry Williams, “Iced” by Ray Shell), movies (Menace II Society, Paid In Full) and television shows (Snowfall, anything produced by 50 Cent). Meanwhile the old neighborhood, like so many in New York City, has been gentrified long time ago with skinny white women jogging along the same blocks where I had seen brutal slayings and blood stains. Cute cafes and restaurants have opened where there were once smoke shops that sold drug paraphernalia and liquor stores. Thinking about yesteryear friends, I remembered that Stanley and Marvin were dead, victims of the crack years, while others relocated to various parts of the state or on the other side of the Hudson. Still, what was most surprising was glancing across the street and seeing James sitting on his stoop. After greeting me with a brotherly hug, when shared a frosty forty and talked about those dark days as though recounting a horror movie. “See that chick over there,” James said, pointing to a beautiful Black woman walking down the hill. “She lives in your old apartment.” Sucking my teeth, I replied, “I’m sure they patched up that bullet hole in the living-room ceiling by now.” And we both laughed. View the full article

My latest mystery novel, The Silversmith’s Puzzle weaves many historical events into my fictional elements. One of those real incidents incorporated is the 1832 Bombay dog riot. India has an unfortunate history of communal riots. In 1946, Hindu-Muslim clashes resulted in approximately ten thousand deaths, with another fifteen thousand people injured. During the 1992 Babri-masjid dispute, (where an ancient mosque was destroyed because it was claimed to be built over an older temple) about two thousand people were viciously butchered. More recently, in the 2002 Gujarat riots, over a thousand people, mostly Muslims, were brutally killed by mobs. So, when I read of the 1832 Dog Riot, I expected something dire. To my astonishment it was my own peace-loving, civic-minded, law-abiding Parsi community that had rioted! In the early 1800s, Bombay was a coastal town with an airy esplanade where troops drilled each morning, soldiers paraded on British holidays, and the English were at the top of the social strata. They enjoyed a comfortable life with servants and dogs, horses and carriages, marred only by the grueling tropical heat and humidity. So, they adopted the custom of taking a nap in the hot afternoons. Shops closed down, business and government offices took a break (with only Indians on staff) while English and wealthy folk rested in darkened bed chambers, the rattan mats freshly watered over windows, and a servant assigned to stir the fans suspended above the beds and settees. However, their afternoon naps were often disturbed by the barking of stray dogs. In 1813, a municipal ordnance was issued to round up these strays during the hottest months of April and May. In 1832, a British magistrate extended this period to mid-June (when the monsoon typically arrived) and set up a bounty system for dog catchers. Since cash was paid for each dog carcass, it became a new source of income for some. The killing of dogs appalled one group in particular: Bombay’s Parsi community. The Parsis are descended from medieval Persian refugees who fled the Arab invasion (600-1000 AD) which spread Islam through the Middle East. These refugees still follow the teachings of the Prophet Zarathushtra. In India, over the centuries, they served Gujarati and Mughal kings. In the 1700s and 1800s, most Parsis adopted western manners and education. During British rule, Parsis integrity and competence led to a dominance in trade, shipping, banking and administrative roles. For Zoroastrians, Dogs are considered important the perfect creation of Ahura Mazda, since they have no wickedness, but only goodness. (A seal is also mentioned as a holy creature, but it is unlikely the writers of the Dinkard or Vendidad scriptures ever saw one). For about three millennia, dogs have had a role in Zoroastrian funerary rites, to sniff the “corpse” and suss-out a person in a deep coma. To slaughter them was anathema. On June 6, which was a holy day, a group of Parsis attacked a group of dog catchers and then marched to the high court to protest the dog culling. Two European constables patrolling the bazaar were assaulted when they tried to defend the dogcatchers. A crowd of two hundred, arms with sticks and stones gathered before the Police station and High Court in the predominantly British, Fort area, to call for an end to dog-culling. The next day the community went on strike. Hindus, Jains, and Muslims joined the Parsi-led protest. Shops in Bhendi Bazaar and Esplanade were closed. Carriages were prevented from moving through the streets. Coaches that persisted through were pelted with stones, rubbish and dead rats! The carriage of Chief Justice Sir J. W. Awdry was similarly pelted. Two to three thousand Parsis and other protesters flooded the streets. Workers unloading ships were harassed and no goods were allowed into the city. Rustomjee Cowasjee, a prominent Parsi gave the order that ships in the harbor would not be unloaded. Jesse Palsetia’s scholarly paper, Mad Docs and Parsis states that: “The daily breakfast rations as well as the billets for cooking, delivered to the troops from 6-8 a.m., were held up or confiscated and despoiled by small groups of Parsis and Hindus at the Butchers’ Bazaar, the harbour Bunder, or upon delivery.” Water carriers were not allowed to bring the troops water. If they did not comply, their carts were overturned. The strike became a grand civil protest. Not one shop remained open for business. The Parsis also organized crowds to prevent food and water and other provisions from reaching the army garrison. A group of about five hundred people surrounded the Police Office. For the British rulers, this was not to be tolerated. By noon, a regiment of “Queen’s Royals’ arrived in Colaba and read out the 1715 “Riot Act”. Leaders of the protest were arrested and the crowd dispersed. However, the next day, a number of influential Parsis and Hindus gathered at the central police office at Fort, to offer assistance in quelling the disturbances. Forty prominent business leaders presented a diplomatically written petition that pleaded for clemency for the dogs, while assuring the British of their loyalty. For the moment, the matter was tabled. In October 1832, the case against the 19 ringleaders (who had been given bail) was heard by a British judge. Palsetia’s paper states that: “Ten individuals, five of whom were Parsi, were found guilty: four for conspiracy; one for assault upon police; and five for rioting. Of the other indictments, five were found by the jury to have been baseless, and should not have been issued, while the remainder indicted were acquitted. The majority of the evidence was deemed defective, and there was no agreement among the jury for many of the charges.” The convicted were sentenced to jail time of one to eighteen months, and some were fined 2,000 rupees. However, the British had learned a valuable early lesson about the need to avoid offending native religious sentiments, one that would be brought home twenty-five years later, with awful carnage during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. Since the dog-cull protest was not for any “political” gain, and no lives were lost, most of those who’d been arrested were released. The regulation against dogs was not repealed (a massive loss of face for the Brits, I imagine). However, efforts were made to transport strays to remote areas such as Bhavnagar. In the Parsi stronghold of Poona, the dog regulation was suspended in toto. Although my book is set in 1895, this historical incident was fascinating. When my character Captain Jim needed a significant diversion at the end of the book, well, I simply couldn’t resist including the “dog riot” in my plot. *** View the full article

The weird western is nothing new. Since at least 1932, with Robert E. Howard’s “The Horror from the Mound,” writers have been combining fantasy, science-fiction, and horror with the Old West in novels, stories, comics, and films. The genre built to a crescendo in the 1980s. The last major iteration I can remember is the 2011 movie Cowboys & Aliens. In our time, well into the 21st century, the genre and the term “weird west” feel long out of fashion—though, like the western itself, it’s a fire that never completely goes out. It flares up again in such tales as the recent limited streaming series Outer Range. My agent wisely describes my new novel as “historical fantasy.” Actually, that is a more accurate term for it. It’s set in the American West of the 1880s, and while unquestionably “weird,” it combines multiple, quite different kinds of story in the way that the vastly-ranging and diverse genre of fantasy does. Some years ago, I heard the horror and fantasy author Peter Straub say, “We read and write fantasy because it’s the genre most capable of depicting the world as it really is.” I’d like to believe that The Country Under Heaven is much more than just “weird” and “a western.” How can a novel encompass fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, the ghost story, literary fiction, and the western? And perhaps more importantly, why would a book try to do that? What was the author thinking? The simplest answer—and certainly a true one—is, “That’s the world I live in.” I would argue it’s the world we all live in, whether we know it or not. We are steeped in the human journey—in tragedy, comedy, pathos, memory, horror, change, mortality. This is the life we live. We rub elbows with ghosts. Life breaks our hearts, then leaves us breathless in the face of beauty. It is supernatural. Since early childhood, I’ve loved stories of the Old West . . . and along with them, stories of monsters. The original King Kong changed me forever—an island not on any map? A colossal wall with a giant gate, and people who live in terror of what’s behind it? And . . . dinosaurs? A gargantuan gorilla?! I’m in! Whereas many kids grow up hearing sports stories from their dads, I heard about cowboys, life on the trail, with coyotes howling over lonesome canyons under the desert moon. My dad also told me all about cryptozoology—Bigfoot, the Mothman, the Loch Ness Monster . . . and UFOs, ancient mysteries, rains of frogs . . . I simply could not get enough of such things. But those notions aren’t just childish escapism. There’s a more serious side to both. Monsters in our imaginative stories give us something we can externalize and fight against—escape from or even defeat—as we deal with the real-life horrors of loss, illness, violence, human cruelty, injustice, death. We’ve been at it for as long as we’ve had a language: our oldest story first recorded in any form of English is Beowulf, written down sometime around 1,000 C.E., and likely existing in oral form a good while before that. It’s a monster story. That we study now in college literature classes. And the western. Beyond the trappings and tropes, there’s a real poignance, a pathos to the Old West. It wasn’t a long period, and it was all about rapid change. Native Americans were being forced off the lands they’d known for generations. Rails were laid, telegraph lines strung, the buffalo were being slaughtered. White people were flocking westward after minerals, occupying the land, putting up fences where fences had never been a thing. Life was harsh. There weren’t many old people, and almost no one had a Hollywood smile. Westerns are mostly elegies—sad, beautiful songs about endings. Things were vanishing that would not come again . . . and it was all happening in a dramatic and beautiful setting—a lovely land that could kill you in the blink of an eye. Where there’s very little law, personal actions make a tremendous difference. Evil gets really ugly fast. Integrity and kindness are more precious than ever. So these big, epic, stirring human stories practically tell themselves . . . and now we’re into literary fiction. “Welcome, pardner, to the Literary Territory.” One important truth I’ve learned about writing is that I always have to ask myself on at least two levels, “What is this story about?” For example, without giving spoilers, in my novel’s chapter about Hat Toynbee in Montana, the surface answer is that the main character, Ovid Vesper, has to accompany Hat Toynbee on a dangerous journey up into the Rocky Mountains to do a particular thing. But the chapter is really about something else—hence, the chapter’s title, “The Good Hour.” At such moments, good genre work becomes literary, when it uncovers truths about what it means to be human. The Country Under Heaven has fantasy threads, too—particularly elements of folk and fairy tales. In the chapter “Wind,” the character Windwagon Smith is straight out of American folklore; he’s a figure something like Paul Bunyan, and he may have been based on one or more real people. He fit right into my purposes, and I wove him in, because I think such elements give readers a sense, maybe a subconscious one, of I’ve heard this somewhere before; this is familiar. It rings true. There’s a similar thing going on in the chapter “The Sound of Bells”—again, without giving too much away, in accounts of medieval history, there are reports attested to be historical fact of two children very much like these children. Richard Decalne and the place called Woolpit are borrowed from the medieval record. In this part of the novel, passage between worlds figures large. I’ve always loved tales of Faery, which tend to be about borders and passages, about seasons and times of day when the walls between worlds grow thin. We don’t have a fairy-lore in the U.S.—we’re too young a country. But I grew up in Illinois, among the cornfields. To enter a cornfield is to plunge into a shadowy, whispering, emerald world that only exists in the summertime. Gone by the later fall, it’s a hidden, secret, ephemeral world . . . so maybe we Americans do have some inklings of Faery after all. There’s also an element of science-fiction in Ovid’s story, mainly in the otherworldly “Craither” that follows Ovid relentlessly through the book. I’m not sure the Craither is supernatural. It might be . . . or it might, like the bizarre creature in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” just be something . . . different. It might be inexplicable simply because it’s so far beyond our experience. Whatever else it is, The Country Under Heaven has been a new kind of storytelling for me. It’s the first time a story or novel has first contacted me not through a place but through a voice: a main character’s steady, gentle, confident voice, speaking to me with a story to tell. *** View the full article

Michael Chorost 1. Story Statement Short version: Jonah Loeb, a deaf and underestimated grad student in entomology, must learn an alien language in order to negotiate peace with a sapient, and angry, ant colony menacing Washington DC. Longer version: Jonah Loeb, a deaf and underestimated grad student in entomology, has to negotiate peace with a sapient, and angry, ant colony that is menacing Washington DC. Its primary weapon is an electromagnetic field that makes humans go psychotic. Jonah’s deafness somehow protects him—so it is he and his small team (a linguist, a neuroscientist, and a physicist) who must go to the planet Formicaris to learn the ant colony’s language. When the neuroscientist begins sabotaging their efforts, Jonah must figure out how to lead his divided team to master, together, an extraordinarily alien way of thinking and speaking. 2. The Antagonist Calvin Armitage is a brilliant grad student in neuroscience, but he is also a ruthless user who believes that he can directly perceive the existence of God. His encounter with the psychosis field makes him believe that the hives of Formcaris are evil, and cannot be trusted to negotiate peaceful coexistence. He secretly begins sabotaging the data that the team’s linguist is using to crack the language, in order to derail even the possibility of negotiation. At the same time, he wants to use the data to advance his own career. Thus he publicly helps the team while privately sabotaging it. Jonah cannot simply replace Calvin; without his formidable intelligence, the team will certainly fail. Jonah is intimidated by Calvin’s arrogance and prowess, but with encouragement from the team’s linguist and from an alien robot, he grows into a confident leader. In the final confrontation with Calvin, Jonah must draw on skills honed by a lifetime of deafness. 3. Title Genre: Science fiction Potential titles: HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS; THE HIVE THAT SHOOK HER HAND; and INTENTIONALITY FIELD. I am not satisfied with any of these. 4. Comps Ted Chiang's novella STORY OF YOUR LIFE; China Miéville's EMBASSYTOWN; R.F. Kuang’s BABEL. All of these novels focus on problems of translation and communication. 5. Core Wound and Primary Conflict A deaf graduate student in entomology struggling for respect and inclusion finds himself, and his small team, thrust into learning an alien language so that they can persuade a sapient, and angry, insect colony to coexist peacefully with humanity. Jonah must overcome his lifelong marginalization in order to successfully lead fellow scientists who are more accomplished than he is. 6. Protagonist’s inner conflict Jonah is attracted to, but ambivalent about, Daphne, the team’s linguist, because she—like him—has a prosthetic body part. (He has a cochlear implant, she has a prosthetic arm.) He cannot make up his mind whether he is attracted to her. This stems from his own doubts about himself: is he worthy of respect and inclusion—that is, is he whole? He unwittingly projects this insecurity onto her. This dynamic is important to the story because he will only be able to defeat the hives’ primary weapon, the psychosis field, when he is able to see both Daphne and himself as whole. Protagonist’s secondary conflict involving social environment: scenario When Jonah and Daphne are in the psychosis field, they can only see each other as machines. Jonah perceives Daphne as ugly because of her prosthetic arm, and scornfully tells her so. She reacts with fury, and later—when the threat is past—treats him with cool remoteness because she is deeply hurt. When Jonah tries, awkwardly, to apologize by saying that she is attractive despite her arm, she sets him straight by telling him that he is attractive because of his deafness. The reason is that he has intelligence and insight despite having struggled to hear early in life—he’s had to learn to be tenacious and resourceful. This sets the stage for Jonah’s later realization that Daphne, too, is beautiful because of, not despite, her prosthetics. 7. The Setting The novel is set in present-day Washington, D.C. and on the hives’ planet, Formicaris. On Earth, key scenes happen in graduate student lounges and scientific labs. The lounges’ grubbiness underscores the low social position of graduate students. On the other hand, they showcase intellectual ambition, with stacks of professional journals and conference posters on the walls. These posters play a crucial role in Jonah’s first encounter with Daphne. When he asks her to explain one of her posters, he realizes that she would be a good fit for the mission to Formicaris. The labs are filled with astoundingly sophisticated equipment, but they show the human side of science as well: they are workplaces, with post-it notes of tech support phone numbers and magnetic poetry on the refrigerators griping about failed experiments. On Formicaris, the team encounters a civilization totally unlike Earth’s. They are shocked by the planet’s high gravity and cacophonous sounds. Initially, they completely fail to understand what they see: enormous polyhedra stacked like toy blocks, hollow spheres zipping about, and dog-sized “elephants” plodding the ground while carrying tools. Vast networks of pipes and plants run through the spaces between the polyhedra. Only gradually do the team members realize that the polyhedra are hives contained in metal shells; the spheres are groups of flying insects that function as their “ears” and “eyes”; and the “little elephants” are their hands. They gradually discover how the hives communicate, and one of the hives—a relatively small one in a misshapen shell—reaches out to the team and eagerly begins teaching them the civilization’s language. It has a disability in that it thinks too fast to communicate easily with its fellow hives, but this makes it uniquely suited for communicating with humans.

1. Act of story statement Sylvie March is a food writer who often neglects her feelings and relationships. When her best friend actress Sugar Mark drowns in front of her, Sylvie must face her complicity in allowing her friend to die. When she is accused of Sugar’s death—is it murder?—an old flame reappears to defend her. Did he love her or only Sugar? 2. Antagonist Sugar Mark has been Sylvie March’s best friend for decades, but she always gets more attention. Is Sylvie finally tired of being second? 3. Title Mostly True Recipe for Murder Watching Her Drown 4. Genre: Women’s Fiction/Chick Lit/Beach Read Paging Aphrodite by Kim Green Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl 5. Hook line As she watches her famous best friend drown in her swimming pool and hesitates to act, a food writer must discover her true feelings for the friend she thought she loved. 6. Inner conflict/Secondary conflict Sylvie March always hesitates, putting others first and stepping away from the spotlight. She hides behind her writing, letting others—especially her best friend, an actress—get the attention. Is she finally tired of coming in second? Accused of murder, Sylvie March faces a long lost love and questions her true feelings. 7. Setting “East Coast girls are hip…” sang the Beach Boys and Sylvie and Sugar have lived from Boston to Cape Cod, Virginia to D.C., and enjoyed the best of their East Coast experiences—from beach to city and the mountains of the Blue Ridge to the cobbled streets of Boston. Oh, and time in London, too. Algonquin Novel Development.docx

where do I post responses to First 7?

This May, the psychological thrillers come from all across the globe! Along with two books written in English, both excellent, this list features four novels in translation. While fiction in translation has a heavy bias towards noir and thrillers, these days you can find plenty of thoughtful, literary suspense making its way to American audiences. Enjoy! Maud Ventura, Make Me Famous Translated by Gretchen Schmid (HarperVia) In this gripping saga of a pop star’s grueling rise to the top, fame is not for the faint-hearted. Maud Ventura blew me away with My Husband (especially that last page!) and Make Me Famous, a Highsmith-esque thriller following a singer’s brutal, callous efforts to become pop star royalty, is just as viciously delightful. Franziska Gänsler, Eternal Summer Translated by Imogen Taylor (Other Press) Climate change has destroyed the German spa town at the center of this near-future ecothriller, fires encroaching and winters vanishing, and most have fled area as the dangers grow worse and the tourists grow fewer. One hotel remains open, and that hotel is now playing refuge to a mysterious woman and child. Are they fugitives? Whatever they’re fleeing, it can’t be as dangerous as their new home…Evocative, terrifying, slow-burn suspense perfect for the start to summer (as this Texas-based editor languishes under a truly oppressive heat dome). Christina Li, The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster) Christina Lee’s debut is a lushly crafted haunted house gothic, full of family secrets and forbidden romance and grounded in Hollywood’s long history of racism & patriarchy. When the first Asian-American woman to win an Oscar dies after a lengthy estrangement from her daughters, she leaves her crumbling estate to the child of her former employees. Her own daughters refuse to accept the will’s startling stipulations without a fight, and as the families complete biltong over the manor, supernatural forces work to reveal hidden truths and enact violent revenge for past injustices. Lee has a talent for understanding the human impulses behind villainous destruction—everyone is understood,but none shall be forgiven. Added to this adage is a sincere belief in the power of love, and an emphasis on the need for honesty in bearing the weight of history. Franck Bouysse, Clay Translated by Laura Vergnaud (Other Press) Franck Bouysse has done it again! By which I mean that Bouysse has written another truly disturbing noir exploration of the depths of human behavior. In Clay, a French farmhouse in the midst of WWI, bereft of its fighting-age men and plow-pulling horses, is the claustrophobic setting for a slow-burn psychological thriller. Bouysse examines the nature of conflict and the weight of history through a limited cast of characters, featuring a struggling mother, her adolescent son, and their resentful neighbor, spared from the draft but not from his own violence, as they grow ever closer to a devastating clash of personalities, ideals, and resentments. Andrea Bartz, The Last Ferry Out (Ballantine) Andrea Bartz is at the top of her game in this moody thriller set on a remote Mexican island full of secretive vacationers. Bartz’s narrator isn’t on vacation, though—she’s there to find out more about her fiancee’s last days, and learn if there’s a wider story behind her partner’s shocking death from food allergens. Yiğit Karaahmet, Summerhouse Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury (Soho) Yigit Karaahmet’s new novel is many things: a stunning love story, a thrilling mystery, and a luscious ode to a gorgeous landscape. As Summerhouse begins, we encounter an aging queer couple who have achieved the near-impossible: 40 years together, happy and free from persecution. Their private, luxurious home on a remote island is the key to their success as a couple, but when a family moves in next door for the summer with a rebellious, and gorgeous, teenage son in tow, all bets are off and the couple will have to fight harder than ever before to secure their future. View the full article

New York Write to Pitch – First Seven Assignments 1. The Act of Story Statement – a. Find a lost and legendary magic to save his people 2. The Antagonist– Captain Culpepper, a disgraced former League officer turned pirate, is the story’s most direct and dangerous antagonist—ambitious, calculating, and obsessed with reclaiming the power he believes was stolen from him. He sees the discovery of Terre Magic not as a cultural artifact, but as a weapon to restore his influence and reshape the world on his terms. Ruthless and resourceful, Culpepper operates from the shadows, sending operatives like Raul to manipulate, threaten, and sabotage Teague’s progress. His personal history with the League mirrors Teague’s own inner conflict about where his loyalties lie, but where Teague seeks meaning and redemption, Culpepper pursues control and revenge. Culpepper’s presence drives the chase, but the story’s deeper antagonistic force is ideological: the battle between those who would exploit Molloy’s magic for political gain, and those who wish to protect it. That tension is embodied in both Culpepper and Cattaneo, the Anbessan military leader who distrusts Chesher’s alliance with outsiders and seeks to preserve the island’s secrecy at all costs. Together, they represent the opposing extremes of domination and isolation—forces Teague and Chesher must navigate if they hope to do more than simply survive. 3. Title Options – a. The Island of Molloy: Part 1—Marked for Travel b. The Edge of Magic c. Echoes of Magic 4. Genre and Comps – Fantasy/Action/Adventure/Romance. The Island of Molloy fits seamlessly into the market alongside recent breakout titles that blend atmospheric fantasy, moral complexity, and emotionally resonant character arcs. With its immersive worldbuilding, slow-burn romance, and magic tied toa dark history, culture, and control, it will appeal to readers who crave depth alongside adventure. Comparable to Fable by Adrienne Young and To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo, The Island of Molloy offers a seafaring edge, an emotionally guarded protagonist, and a hidden world with political stakes. Like The Atlas Six and A Darker Shade of Magic, it balances high-concept magical systems with themes of loyalty, identity, and the ethical cost of power. Readers drawn to The Starless Sea will recognize the layered mystery and the way the story and setting fold into one another, while fans of Sorcery of Thorns will connect with the reluctant alliance at the heart of the narrative. With strong crossover appeal between Young Adult and Adult audiences, The Island of Molloy stands out for its introspective tone, and lyrical style. It’s ideal for readers who want fantasy that lingers—rich in tension, secrets, and slow-burning emotional stakes. 5. Core Wound and Primary Conflict – Logline a. When an ex-navigator turned undercover archivist uncovers a missing girl’s journal from a forbidden island, he’s thrust into a dangerous chase for ancient magic that could save his crew, rife with tangled loyalties, and buried truths—haunted by his past and hunted by pirates, Teague must decide who he is, and who he’s willing to become, before the island consumes everything left of him. 6. Inner/Interpersonal Conflict Summary – The Island of Molloy is built on a tightly layered web of conflict—external, interpersonal, and internal—that drives both the plot and character development. At the story’s core is the primary conflict: Teague Dubois, a disgraced League navigator working undercover, joins a diplomatic mission to the mysterious island of Molloy in pursuit of a legendary travel magic known as Terre Magic. His goal, complicated by secrets and shifting loyalties, places him in direct opposition to multiple forces—his own government, a ruthless pirate from his past, and the islanders themselves, who seek to protect their power and sovereignty. The rediscovery of magic becomes a political flashpoint, one that threatens to upend fragile diplomatic relations and reignite old wounds. These high stakes are intensified by interpersonal conflicts that ripple through the narrative. Teague’s growing bond with Chesher Tello, the explorer long thought lost and now embedded with the Anbessans, begins in suspicion and slowly deepens into emotional tension. Both are forced to navigate their conflicted loyalties and unspoken truths as they are drawn closer by mutual purpose and personal history. Meanwhile, Teague’s duplicity strains his relationship with his Havalan companions, Bakshi and Valverde, as trust fractures within the diplomatic party. On the island, Chesher faces opposition from Cattaneo, her Anbessan superior, who fears her alliance with outsiders may jeopardize their people’s survival. The reemergence of Captain Culpepper, a former League officer turned notorious criminal, adds external pressure, forcing Teague to reckon with a past he thought he had outrun—and an enemy willing to weaponize the island’s magic. Beneath these political and interpersonal layers lies Teague’s most personal conflict: the battle between the man he once was, loyal to the League and the man who raised him, and the man he might still become. Longing for his old life, but forced to remain on his path of subterfuge, Teague clings to a fabricated identity and fight his own uncertainty as he is driven to reclaim purpose and worth. As his connection to Chesher and the island deepens, Teague must confront his core wound—his fear of being permanently lost, directionless, and unworthy of redemption. Choosing between duty and desire, control and trust, becomes the emotional fulcrum of his arc. In this way, The Island of Molloy builds tension not just through external danger, but through the intimate choices that shape identity, power, and belonging. 7. Setting – The setting of The Island of Molloy is central to the novel’s atmosphere, conflict, and narrative momentum. Officially abandoned, Molloy is a place the outside world has written off as uninhabitable—once used as a dumping ground for dangerous fauna and now dismissed as a ghost island. But this surface-level mythology conceals a thriving, secretive civilization and a layered geography shaped by misinformation, history, and magic. The terrain itself is a character: dense jungle, hidden valleys, treacherous coastlines, and overgrown ruins create an environment that is as disorienting as it is beautiful. Much of Molloy’s power lies in what it withholds—its camouflaged communities, false maps, and its manipulation of distance and perception through Terre Magic, a transport-based magic controlled by the Anbessan people. The magic is not only a tool but a cultural safeguard—used to protect Molloy from discovery, and to resist the colonizing forces that would exploit its secrets. The island’s political structure reinforces this tension: a shadow government keeps its own people in line through magic-bound oaths and power plays, complicating the protagonist’s efforts to determine who can be trusted. Molloy is more than a hidden world—it’s a contested one, with its own stakes, loyalties, and history of suppression. As Teague and his companions move through this landscape, they are forced to confront the blurred lines between exploration and intrusion, diplomacy and exploitation. While Molloy serves as the novel’s emotional and narrative core—a hidden island cloaked in mystery, forgotten history, and tightly guarded magic—other settings expand the political and cultural scope.. The story deliberately introduces readers to the wider world of Vemados, using the journey itself to expand scope and tension. Teague’s diplomatic mission departs from Havalivala’s capital, Kasoji—a city desperately trying to modernize, seat to the government, and a burgeoning military force—and passes through Brahma, a bustling coastal city shaped by trade, culture, and political rumor. Their travels continue into the border nation of Tiebout, the inland metropolis of Sabazan, and the small maritime power of Baldassare, all members of the Kysh Alliance. Each of these locations offers distinct political climates and social dynamics, anchoring the novel’s themes of secrecy, erasure, and contested history in tangible environments. These settings aren’t simply worldbuilding—they’re plot-driving forces. Each place introduces new cultural rules, unseen threats, and interpersonal challenges that shape Teague’s mission and personal arc. The novel uses movement across these landscapes not just to add texture, but to build tension and purpose. Together, they form a living world that reflects the novel’s core questions: Who gets to write history? Who controls the truth? And what does it cost to uncover what was meant to stay buried?

Thrillers flirt with the absurd. Everyone knows this, except the people in thrillers, who are far too busy misplacing briefcases, dangling from cornices, falling in love with the wrong people, and being chased through cobblestoned foreign capitals to notice how ridiculous everything has gotten. The “screwball thriller” is a genre of fiction that’s been celebrated on these pages before. But in my corner of the world, which is cinema, I’ve never heard it applied to movies. That, my friends, ends today. Ernst Lubitsch may have first plated the tart, larcenous young couple in Trouble in Paradise (1932), but it was Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) that gave us the screwball thriller’s enduring recipe: Take two mismatched strangers on the run, fold in mistaken identities and a campy MacGuffin, crank the heat and sprinkle generously with crackling screwball banter. If that sounds like a good time, you’re in luck. Grab your fake passport, slip on your sexiest getaway shoes, and join me on a globe-trotting caper to bag five dazzling but lesser-known jewels of the genre. 5. Out of Time (2003, dir. Carl Franklin) “What kind of prick dies at cocktail hour on a Friday?” There’s a playful menace wiggling under every line of dialogue in Out of Time, Carl Franklin’s demented Florida noir – a reunion with Denzel Washington after their success with Devil in a Blue Dress. Washington plays a small-town police chief entangled with a troubled married woman. The first act charms, then dawdles, then slams the thrusters as Denzel finds himself implicated in a double-murder, and racing to outrun his own police force’s investigation to find out who set him up. One of the first films he made after Training Day, Out of Time is a cheeky riff on the 1948 screwball thriller The Big Clock, and features, without exaggeration, the tensest fax scene ever committed to celluloid. Where to stream for free: Tubi. 4. That Man From Rio (1964, dir. Philippe de Broca) Hot on the heels of stylish American screwball thrillers North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963), French director Philippe de Broca tried his hand with the gloriously ridiculous That Man from Rio – a film that would, improbably, inspire the creation of Indiana Jones and help define the modern blockbuster. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a French airman on leave whose girlfriend, the effervescent Françoise Dorléac, is kidnapped in Paris and whisked to Brazil by art-smuggling baddies. What follows is a frenzied chase through Rio, the Amazon, and the surreal modernist moonscape of Brasília. Belmondo, doing many of his own stunts, careens through each sequence with balletic slapstick flair – the action looks both buffoonish and genuinely dangerous. Reportedly, Steven Spielberg saw the film nine times and credited it as a key inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Every time I see That Man from Rio, it makes me smile like an idiot, and though I sang its praises recently in my film Substack Underexposed, I couldn’t resist sharing it with you here. 3. Save the Green Planet! (2003, dir. Jang Joon-hwan) Inspired by Stephen King’s Misery, but underwhelmed by Annie Wilkes as a villain (too normal), South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan hatched this feral genre mutant about a man who kidnaps his former boss after becoming convinced that he’s an alien sent to destroy Earth. Part zany sci-fi slapstick, part torture thriller, part gonzo chamber drama, Save the Green Planet! was shunned by Korean audiences upon release, but has since garnered an international cult following as a classic of New Korean Cinema, sometimes compared to Dr. Strangelove and Brazil. Ari Aster planned to remake the film, then passed it to Yorgos Lanthhimos, who teamed up with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons and retitled it Bugonia. The reboot arrives later this year. Where to stream: Kanopy. 2. Game Night (2018, dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein) Speaking of Jesse Plemons, the 2018 studio comedy Game Night slyly reintroduced audiences to the dark delights of the screwball thriller. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams play hyper-competitive suburbanites whose weekly game night turns deadly when a fake kidnapping gets hijacked by actual criminals. What begins with charades spirals into shootouts, with a surprisingly elegant one-shot action sequence involving a Fabergé egg that ranks among the best in recent memory. Macabre, manic, and far smarter than it looks, Game Night is the rare studio comedy that gets funnier the more times you play. Where to stream: The Roku Channel 1. The Hot Rock (1972, dir. Peter Yates) Fresh off Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Robert Redford slipped into the role of another affable outlaw, John Dortmunder, in The Hot Rock, a breezy caper comedy scripted by William Goldman. Adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s novel (the first in a 14-volume series), the film follows Dortmunder and his partner-in-crime, played by George Segal, as they attempt to steal the same diamond again and again and again, only to be thwarted in increasingly ridiculous ways. By taking the tired “one last job” trope and dropping it on its head repeatedly, The Hot Rock mystified audiences and critics at first, but has since found cult appreciation. In his review, Roger Ebert said the film, though far from perfect, “has two or three scenes good enough for any caper movie ever made. If you’re a pushover for caper movies, like I am, that will be enough.” Currently available on DVD. View the full article